Thanks for the explanation!
I don't "need" it fixing... disabling images isn't something I do very often - but it was annoying enough to comment on. I'd think it'd affect visually impaired people who use screen-readers, though.
If it was felt worth it, I'm pretty sure it could be fixed at the HTML level. You can generate tooltips using the TITLE attribute instead of the ALT attribute. (And set the ALT attribute to an empty string, to indicate that the image can safely be ignored -- otherwise there's a risk that it backfires and screenreaders will read out the entire image URL instead). Of course that doesn't say how difficult it is to change the code that generates the HTML.
While I was googling this, I saw a claim that IE8 has actually stopped showing alt-text as a tooltip, so TITLE should also make for more consistent behaviour.
Post icon: 8-) (glasses-wearing-geek).
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